12/30/2010 @ 12:40PM

IBM Plays Jeopardy!

Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy!-playing supercomputer, is going to make a massively parallel impact on an unsuspecting world in February, when the powerful Q&A machine goes up against the two greatest Jeopardy! champions of all time, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, on national television.

Jennings, you’ll recall, won 74 games in a row in the 2004-05 season, a DiMaggian record that will likely never be broken. Rutter, who has never lost a Jeopardy! match, won $3.25 million in prize money, also a record, by taking first place in three different Tournaments of Champions. These guys are the best there are at what they do–unlike yours truly, who was doing quite well until blowing the final question in my one and only Jeopardy! appearance on Boxing Day 2007.

Something tells me that Jennings and Rutter are going to go down, too, if not this February, then eventually. As anyone who has seen 2001: A Space Odyssey or the Terminator series knows, computers don’t give up. Nor does IBM when its reputation is on the line. IBM’s chess-playing supercomputer Deep Blue and its predecessor took six years of fine-tuning before finally beating chess master Garry Kasparov in 1997.

This time around IBM built an entirely different kind of machine, a marvel of natural language processing that can apply up to 1,000 algorithms to the info equivalent of millions of books. It understands anagrams, puns, wordplay and has memorized every Shakespeare soliloquy, major river and world capital. A team of 20 to 25 IBMers have spent the past four years tuning Watson’s algorithms to speed up its analysis, inferencing and answer retrieval. In 2006 it was rarely confident enough to buzz in and was correct only 15% of the time. Now it is smart enough to have spent much of this autumn in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., sparring successfully with former Jeopardy! champions in preparation for the Jennings-Rutter throwdown.

David Ferrucci, the IBM scientist running the project, won’t say what Watson’s record was this fall but insists it is ready for Ken and Brad (and Alex Trebek). Watson, named after IBM’s founder, Thomas J. Watson, harnesses a massively parallel network of 2,000 to 3,000 Power 7 computing cores in six refrigerator-size containers. IBM has fed Watson any and all licensed and publicly available content to create a huge semantic index.

When clues are read by the host they are fed electronically to Watson, which parses the text, formulates hunches and checks all the evidence it can retrieve to test its hunches and then generates its five best answers, assigning each a confidence level before deciding whether to buzz in. It can assess the dollar amounts left on the Jeopardy! board, how far behind or ahead it is, how well it is doing in a given category and adjust its confidence level to suit. Ferrucci says if Watson is way behind it will accept a lower confidence level of, say, 40%, in an attempt to “go for it,” but it can also think to itself, “I’m so far ahead, why take the risk?” and refuse to buzz in despite a confidence level of, say, 75%.

Watson, however, is functionally blind and deaf, so it cannot answer audio or video Daily Doubles. Those are forgone in Watson games. Ferrucci says Watson also has trouble with clues that deal strictly in the realm of human experience, such as “Look in this direction and you will see the wainscoting.” Watson answered “Wall” when the answer was “What is down?”

Watson may also get thrown at first by a category such as Whirled Capitals, which is looking for anagrams of nations’ capitals, but after the first couple of clues it will think to itself, “Aha, we’re doing anagrams now,” and proceed to nail it.

The Jeopardy! challenge is a fun promotion for Watson’s more serious applications in diagnosing disease, handling online technical support questions and parsing vast tracts of legal documents. “It overcomes the recall blindness of finding documents you forgot you had read,” said Ferrucci. That said, his entire experience with Watson is underscored by a deep appreciation for the power of the human brain, which can do in seconds using material that can fit into a shoebox what it takes six refrigerators’ worth of machinery to do.

Richard Doherty, research director at the Envisioneering Group in Seaford, N.Y., got an early look at Watson and was floored. “This is way beyond the database and spreadsheet era we are now leaving behind. People want answers,” he says. He sees the potential for Watson cousins customized with analytics for traffic-pattern optimization and emergency planning devoid of the emotions that bedevil mere people. Charles King of Pund-IT in Concord, Mass. expects that “we’ll eventually see Watson-like technologies cropping up in commercial computing solutions before too long.” The Watson Jeopardy! shows will air Feb. 14, 15 and 16. The grand prize is $1 million, with second place earning $300,000 and third place earning $200,000. Rutter and Jennings will donate half of their winnings to charity. IBM will donate all of its winnings to charity. May the best circuitry win.